The government of Mayor Jaume Collboni now denies that in the last municipal Urban Planning commission it agreed with the Junts councilors to reform the Special Urban Planning Plan for Tourist Accommodations (Peuat) in order to authorize the opening of hotels of a unique nature in the center of Barcelona . Laia Bonet, the deputy mayor of Urban Planning, posted a tweet this Thursday afternoon in which she assures that if the Peaut is reviewed “it will be to adapt it to the new Catalan and Spanish regulations, and it will always be done while maintaining the current restrictions.” .
The truth is that given the session held last Tuesday afternoon, the tweet posted by the Deputy Mayor for Urban Planning seems like a most unexpected surprise. Xavier Trias's team are still stunned. The agreements of these commissions are not binding, but they usually clearly illustrate the intentions of the different municipal groups. Perhaps the great citizen uproar unleashed after the vote has pushed the socialist executive to make these last clarifications.
Junts' proposal was clear: reform the Peuat so that hotel establishments of a unique nature can be opened in zones one and two. The requirements to achieve this category, however, were still pending development in the proposal. In addition, those from Trias also proposed lifting the veto on renting rooms in one's own home and assuming the regulation proposed by the Generalitat in 2020.
The text established these changes to be processed officially within a period of three months, but this term was eliminated after the final draft was negotiated with the socialists. Transactions are small fixes to facilitate agreements between different groups. Then, in the corresponding vote, the socialists abstained, but it was precisely this abstention that allowed the Junts proposal to go ahead. If the PSC councilors had voted against the proposal it would have been rejected.
“We always understood that the change requested by the government was to make it possible to vote in favor,” Junts pointed out shortly after reading the deputy mayor's tweet. At the end and shortly before the debate on the proposal began, the government announced that it was abstaining, relativizing the change and emphasizing that the proposal was also allowed to be approved. Furthermore, those from Junts added in a statement, “in any case, let us remind Bonet that Mayor Collboni, just fifteen days after being sworn in, in an interview with the Efe agency literally agreed to make some exceptions to the planning in the case. of some hotel in favor of quality.”
